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Creating Mysterious Symbols & Patterns

Creating Mysterious Symbols & Patterns

Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom

Genshin Impact

Sometimes you want to create mysterious symbols. A couple of games, like Zelda and Genshin, have taken the good of seal characters(篆书), which are the writings used in ancient China around 200 BC. They have an specific style by curves positioned into tall rectangles, and really looks like some magical runes. It gets even better if you are creating oriental theme things.

I have trained a Lora by throwing 1000 pics, each with a seal character in it. You can just grab it for using. Simply set the output size to 256x256, and give no prompts other than the lora, you will easily create tons of it, like these -

They are fake characters, so you don't have to worry who can read seal characters reading nonsense out of them. They are imaginary symbols that produce the calligraph feeling, not actual characters.

This lora can also produce patterns.

Set the size to 512x512(or anything bigger than supposed 256), it will create patterns that keeps the calligraph style, and looks like some ancient magic enchantment. Well, it drains sanity, though.

Apart from that, you can slightly control what it looks like by adding more prompts into it. If you add "circle", you get this:

Quite useful if you are trying to create a seal for a magical gate or so.

If you add "diamond", you get this:

Not really in the shape of a diamond, but it do feels solid.

Lets see if you add "water" -

Well, it do seems like water. Feel free to try it out.

Those sealed characters are only one of the ancient Chinese handwritings, but is probably the most common one used in creating ancient Chinese feel for their distinct style. Also, note that actual sealed characters have variants in practice, they are not always the same when writing.

Nowadays among the Chinese people, only a few can read or write those ancient characters, and only a few of those characters. Some of the character go too far from modern writings and are very hard to recognize, but those for "fire" "water" "dirt" "sky" almost stayed the same.

Writings change along the history, not only the characters, but also the meaning and the grammar of them. Just by replacing modern Chinese with a ancient font is different than actual ancient writings.

Sometimes, it is just better to use imaginary symbols that to use a font that says nonsense or modern words with acient characters. Imagine you see an ancient ruins with a stone that says "you" instead of "thee". Thats why I made this. If one knows few about history, then stay far from it is better than mimicking it badly.

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